LaRouche: Stop Dope, Inc.'s
Takeover of World Economy

Jan. 30"This is Doomsday Time," Lyndon LaRouche warned in a Jan. 28 statement issued by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. "The world's available money supply is tied largely to the attempted bailout of financial institutions, and you've got a shortage of money, of any kind of credit, building up rapidly into catastrophic levels in every other area."

With no money available for useful production, and most world leaders still not willing to address the necessary bankruptcy reorganization of the entire international financial system, unemployment is skyrocketing, factories are closing, state and national governments around the world are teetering at the edge of insolvency, and world trade is grinding to a halt. In late January, the usually staid United Nations' International Labor Organization (ILO) issued a report forecasting that 50 million jobs would be lost worldwide by the end of 2009, and that there will shortly be 1.4 billion "working poor"about half the planet's working-age population.

The ILO's forecast is actually "optimistic," LaRouche responded, given the accelerating disintegration of the global economy. "People are going to start dying as a result of these economic conditions."

Furthermore, the London-centered international drug cartel known as Dope, Inc. is moving in "to take over the whole world economy," LaRouche warned.

The danger is that the people who are pushing drugs will thrive; and those who get drug money will feel that they are going to thrive, too. And those who are not getting the drug money are going to find out that they don't get anything.

Now, the argument is that you have to be good to the drug pushers, because they are the only ones who are supplying the loose cash with this situation presently, in which the world money supply is collapsing and the drug supply of money is increasing.

LaRouche said that this drug takeover of the world economy by the British Empire, operating through front men like the Nazi-trained George Soros, has to be stopped cold. "Destroy the bastards! Shut them down. There's no reason to put up with this crap. Civilization is at stake," LaRouche insisted.

'The Whole System Is Infected'

The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, has also exposed the escalating role of drug money in bailing out the drowning banking system. In a Jan. 27 interview in the Austrian magazine Profil and in comments to Associated Press, Costa said drug money laundering in unprecedented amounts is "certainly happening across the board.... The money is available, and the need for that money is there. I think the whole system is infected," Costa asserted (see below).

Costa estimated that the total street value of all illicit drugs was about $320 billion a year. This, however, significantly understates the magnitude of the problem, according to a new systematic study of Dope, Inc.'s global activities that EIR is currently preparing. Preliminary findings indicate that the total dollar value of drug production may well be two to three times UNODC's figure, and that other components of the global "black" economy illegal weapons, commmodities contraband, gambling, prostitution, etc.are probably as much again as the drug money, bringing the total into the ballpark of $1.5-2 trillion a year.

In these days of trillion-dollar TARP bailouts and quadrillion-dollar vaporization of derivatives and other financial assets, $2 trillion may not sound like a lot of money. But this is loose, highly-liquid, free-floating cash, which can go a long way to purchase politicians and narcoterrorist armies, and salvage friendly financial institutionsalbeit briefly.

The campaign for drug legalization, which Soros is spearheading internationally, will only make the problem far, far worse by vastly increasing drug consumption and revenues. The constantly repeated refrain that, "You just can't win the war on drugs, so we may as well strike a deal," is a pack of lies.

"The only reasons we have a drug problem," LaRouche stated on Jan. 19, "is because governments don't want to take it away. People say, 'Well, you can't solve the problem.' What do you mean you can't solve the problem?! We have the technological means to detect everything in fine detail, to find all of this stuff; we know how to develop methods for solving the problem. They choose not to do it! That's the reasonit's the only reason. Because you have a system which is doing it. You have to shut down the system."

Operation Afghanistan

LaRouche this week urged the Obama Administration to launch a serious war against drugs, as the best wayin fact, the only wayto solve the crisis in Afghanistan and Southwest Asia in general (see below).

"There is no hope for Afghanistan or Pakistan, so long as the drug trade is allowed to flourish," LaRouche stated. "The most direct way to shut down that trade, and establish the necessary conditions for a viable policy for South and Central Asia, is to first eliminate George Soros. Shut down his offshore operations, remove him from any access to the American political process. Cart him off to jail. Then, come and talk to me about an appropriate strategy for bringing stability and prosperity to Afghanistan and Pakistan." LaRouche added: "George Soros is so pivotal to the British opium war operations, whether in Afghanistan/Pakistan, or in Mexico and other parts of the Western Hemisphere, that no victory is possible in either of these areas, so long as Soros is allowed to operate."

LaRouche has also emphasized that the new war on drugs must be fought with a minimum of deadly violence, using advanced technologiesespecially space-based technologiesto defeat the enemy by detecting, eradicating, interdicting, and seizing drug flows at every stage of the process. LaRouche has dubbed the needed approach "Operation Afghanistan."

Dope, Inc. has in fact converted Afghanistan into a giant opium and heroin producing machine for the global drug market that London has created. Afghan opium production soared by 140% over the last five years since the NATO invasionfrom 3,400 metric tons in 2002 to some 8,200 metric tons in 2007and its share of world production leapt from 75% to 92% in the same period (see Figure 1).

Dope, Inc. has a lot going for it in Afghanistan. Opium yields there averaged about 40 kilograms per hectare over the past three years, which is substantially higher than the 15 kg/ha average in most other opium producing countries. It is widely known that half of Afghan opium is grown in the British-occupied Helmand province, which is only 9% of the country's land area. As Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Baheen put it on Jan. 18: "Afghanistan's opium production was only high in places where international foreign forces were stationed, like the British troops in Helmand."

The vast majority of Afghan opium is converted into heroin, mostly inside Afghanistan itself, or in laboratories located just across the border in Pakistan. Furthermore, since about 2002, Afghanistan has improved the efficiency of its conversion of opium into heroin, by about 15%. Instead of requiring 10 kilograms of opium to produce 1 kilo of heroin (which has been the standard historic average around the world for decades), Afghanistan now requires only 8.5 kg of opium to produce 1 kg of heroin.

This means that, out of an estimated world production of about 795 tons of heroin in 2007, Afghanistan produced some 753 tons (95% of the total), and the rest of the world produced only 42 tons. The "Afghan bonus" due to the increased conversion efficiency since 2002, has added about 110 tons to what it otherwise would have producedwhich, alone, is nearly three times what the rest of the world produced!

If we compare world production of opium and cocaine over the period 1995-2007, a crucial point comes into focus. Opium production increased by 90% during this period (from 4,475 tons in 1995, to 8,484 tons in 2007), with phenomenal increases, especially in the last two to three years in Afghanistan. Cocaine production, on the other hand, was almost flat during that same period, inching up from 929 tons in 1995, to 940 tons in 2007.

The reason? Eradication of over half of all coca plantations, principally in Colombia. If there had been no coca eradication, cocaine production in 2007 would have been 1,903 tons, almost double the 940 tons that actually were produced. And the curve of rising cocaine production from 1995 to 2007 would have looked like an exact copy of the curve for opium production (see Figure 2).

Stated otherwise: Over the past four years, Afghanistan eradicated less than 7% of its poppy crop. Why so little? Because the British wouldn't allow it, because they are promoting drugs in Afghanistan, and internationally. According to a July 2008 article in the New York Times Magazine, by former ambassador Thomas Schweich, a high-level anti-narcotics official from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs: When an aerial interdiction effort was briefly undertaken a few years ago in Afghanistan, the British command in the Helmand opium province "actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort."

During the same period that almost no poppy plants were eradicated in Afghanistan, the coca-growing nations of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivabut especially Colombiaeradicated 50% of the total coca crop.

But even these levels of eradication are modest, compared to what can be achieved with full deployment of shared modern technology, based on cooperation among sovereign nation-states. EIR has estimated that fully 90% of all drug cropscoca, poppy/opium, and marijuanacould be eradicated with a serious deployment of high-tech detection and eradication technologies. All that is lacking is the political will to do it.